In this age of Facebook and other powerful instant mass …

In this age of Facebook and other powerful instant mass communication Royal Commissions are fast losing relevance to their original purpose.
The mass visual giving of evidence and the appearance of individual witnesses such as Dylan Voller become the centrepieces in a media circus which resembles episodes of Prisoners or Days of Our Lives and other emotive-based melodramas on our tellie screens.
In this viewing environment, individual characters are are given a certain popular image and the real issues are drowned in an impossible mix of sensationalistically reported alleged incidents and mini crises.
Commission recommendations and their future implementation end up running a long distant second place to the melodrama. Right now, the star character is Dylan Voller and the question on everyone’s lips is – will he be awarded $$ compensation and if so, how much?
He is already an anti-hero star with a generation of teenage would-be victims and rebels.
The tears will flow over vivid accounts of torture and the guards will be on the backfoot trying to defend themselves to a young viewing audience.
My gut feeling is that Royal Commissions are fast becoming little more than a lawyers’ paradise, jostling for viewer ratings in a goldfish bowl of instant entertainment.

Recent Comments by John Bell

Heatwaves need to be treated as emergencies: Cr Cocking@ Domenico. So many people whom you loosely call “deniers” agree with you that action is to be taken to reduce pollution yet disagree strongly with you and those who are loosely termed “alarmists” on the anthropogenic percentage cause of impending catastrophic global warming. And on how to deal with the problem. So both sides are tired of arguing.
However, all scientific argy bargy and arguments of methodology aside, there are serious ethical issues in the debate on catastrophic global warming that will not go away or be silenced.
A major ethical issue for me is this question: How can any alarmist in government or oppositiin or in the general public morally justify the continued sale of fossil fuel coal to other countries?
It seems to be hypocrisy writ large to me.

I never found my motherMillie and John. Just in case you may have lost touch with Gordon and Norma.
They moved from Canberra when Gordon retired and shifted to Mosquito Bay on the NSW South Coast several years ago.

House break-ins more than doubleThe increase in house break-ins is a trend not just in Alice, but in Melbourne and elsewhere around the country.
It is an invasion of privacy that frightens most people and destroys public confidence.
Could this growing phenomenon be partly because of the fact that social media has broken down the old standards of personal privacy in the community?
If young people can so easily say and post just about anything to bully in a public media forum, then it stands to reason that their respect for the privacy of others must gradually be eroded.
The only way to teach them respect is to show them the suffering their invasion causes.
If that does not work, then payback becomes an option that is gathering momentum in a community that is frightened by the failure of the authorities to deal with it.

The stolen child who went to universityWorked with Joe Croft in DAA in Canberra.
Crofty was a goodhearted bloke and he listened to what everyone had to to say.
That struck me about Crofty. He was a great listener.

Heatwaves need to be treated as emergencies: Cr Cocking@ Ali Corcoran: “The power of arguing from an evidence base–for which anthropogenic causation is overwhelming. Having an ‘entitled’ belief does not make that belief correct in the real, non-flat-earth, world.”
To put King or Queen Canute into perspective.
Four centuries ago, the overwhelming consensus was that earth was, indeed, flat. The “real world” of the day. Then along came Galileo.
In the same vein when overwhelming argument was that the sun revolved around the earth, along came Copernicus.
In essence, the Canute story is an analogy for mankind’s assumed superior knowledge over nature.
To say that man’s ever-refutable consensus evidence proves man’s superior influence over nature is open to challenge.
That is not only Jacinta’s right. The history of eminent precedent tends to make her position highly credible.